My Home

My Home

My Recipes

My Recipes

Toddler Fashion

Toddler Fashion

6 months on, exclusively breastfeeding to weaning

Wednesday, 4 March 2015

I am coming to the end of my breast feeding journey. I have lasted 6 months which has not been easy let me tell you. When I was pregnant and doing all my research on 'How to be a Mummy'. I decided that I was going to breastfeed exclusively for 6 months. It was what the NHS recommended and what I felt was the best option. What I wasn't prepared for was how hard it would be.I had no idea that there was a chance my milk wouldn't come in straight away and I would have to top baby girl up with formula for the first 5 days of her life, or that when my milk did come in - there would be so much of it I would be engorged and have to battle with mastitis 3 times, or that if I wanted to express so my husband J could give baby girl a bottle I would battle to find time in my busy day to be able to do so, and even after 40 minutes of blood, sweat and tears I would have pupped a mere 20 mls not even enough for half a feed, or the aches and pains, or even that baby girl would point blank refuse the bottle and want to feed off me every two hours making it impossible for her to leave my side (Most times I did secretly love this). Yep, nobody told me and I certainly didn't come across any of that during my research.After 4 months of hard work and many times that I considered giving up it suddenly became easy. Super easy. Baby girl was going longer between feeds, I had no bottles to sterilise or formula to prepare and no more aches and pains. The last two months have been fantastic and I've been really enjoying breastfeeding.Now I am faced with my next challenge. Weaning. It's time to introduce baby girl to food. For the last two weeks I've been giving her puree vegies to her for dinner. So far she's tried sweet potato, carrots, peas and parsnip all of which she has loved and avocado which she really didn't like. The next step is introducing some variety in her diet. I find this quite daunting. I had no idea where to start and I wanted to provide baby girl with wholesome, healthy food that would give her the best introduction to the world of eating. After doing some research earlier in the week I took myself to the bookshop and found this fabulous book by Annabel Karmel.

It's really great as it not only gives so much information on weaning throughout the various stages but also has loads of yummy recipes that look so great I'd like to try them myself! I got really keen and made baby girl batches of two meals in one afternoon. The cheesy leek, sweet potato and cauliflower and the salmon corn chowder. Both recipes gave me a decent amount and I have frozen them so I can store in the freezer and defrost for dinner time. I can't wait to for baby girl to try them and for me to try cooking some more recipes.

I also found these handy freezer pots in John Lewis to store the meals. They are great as they are the perfect portion size for a meal and are silicone so once frozen they are really easy to pop out. So I can reuse them for the next batch I popped these babies out and put them in a snap lock bag, wrote it's contents and the date on it and there are now 9 wholesome meals ready for defrosting for baby girl's dinners.I feel like I have made a good start. Now I've got to build up my repetiour, introduce 3 meals a day, do a little more baby led weaning and try and get baby girl off the boob and onto formula. Wish me luck!Annabel Karmel - Weaning book purchased from WHSmith currently on sale £6.99 - totally worth every penny!!Beaba Multi-Portion Silicone Freezing Tray purchased from John Lewis - £10.00K x